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    Pike Fishing
    Pike Fishing
    Pike Fishing
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    Pike Fishing

    By David Phillips

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This book is an updated version of Pike, which first appeared in print in 1990, as part of Beekay’s Successful Angling series. More than two decades later, it has been completely revised and updated by the author to reflect the new challenges of pike fishing in the second decade of the 21st century. Appropriately, this edition is published in ebook format to appeal to a new generation of pike anglers. But, most importantly, it is packed with information to help you catch more (and bigger) pike.
    David Phillips caught his first pike in 1967; his first double followed in 1968 and his first 20-pounder in 1971, when he was aged just 15. Since then he has fished for pike in all corners of the British Isles – including the mighty loughs of Ireland, where he once landed five consecutive pike averaging over 20 lb (and all on artificial lures).
    The pike, which is known as the northern pike in the USA and Canada, is found throughout the northern hemisphere. If you love catching pike – or want to learn how to catch them – this is the book you can’t afford to miss.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Phillips
    Release dateMay 2, 2012
    ISBN9781476233277
    Pike Fishing
    Author

    David Phillips

    David Phillips (FCPA, retired) spent most of his career in finance and management. The first period of his retirement was enjoyed as a hobby farmer in the Acheron Valley, north of Melbourne. From a very early age he had a guitar, wrote songs, sang with bands and solo, always as a hobby alongside a career but always with passion and pleasure. He enjoyed fifties rock but soon found country music to be his favourite genre. In his final years of retirement he has become enchanted with writing and MINSTRELS! is the first of what he hopes will be several works before his time is up!

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      Book preview

      Pike Fishing - David Phillips

      About Pike Fishing

      This book is an updated version of Pike, which first appeared in print in 1990, as part of Beekay’s Successful Angling series. More than two decades later, it has been completely revised and updated by the author to reflect the new challenges of pike fishing in the second decade of the 21st century. Appropriately, this edition is published in ebook format to appeal to a new generation of pike anglers. But, most importantly, it is packed with information to help you catch more (and bigger) pike.

      David Phillips caught his first pike in 1967; his first double followed in 1968 and his first 20-pounder in 1971, when he was aged just 15. Since then he has fished for pike in all corners of the British Isles – including the mighty loughs of Ireland, where he once landed five consecutive pike averaging over 20 lb (and all on artificial lures).

      The pike, which is known as the northern pike in the USA and Canada, is found throughout the northern hemisphere. If you love catching pike – or want to learn how to catch them – this is the book you can’t afford to miss.

      Pike Fishing

      By David Phillips

      Published by nenemedia.com at Smashwords

      Copyright 2012 David Phillips

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks go first to my father, William Phillips, who in 1966 made my first cane rod and encouraged me to go fishing. Way back in the 1930s, Dad had landed a mighty 26 lb pike from Hatchett Pond, in his native New Forest. It wasn’t until 1983 that I managed to better that, with one weighing 27 lb 8 oz, from the Norfolk Broads.

      Thanks also to the great pike anglers of the 1960s, whose written exploits inspired youngsters like my school pal Neville Fielding and myself to attempt to emulate them.

      Neville, of course, went on to better their achievements, as did my great mate Eddie Turner. My own enjoyment and catches in the 1970s and 80s would have been much poorer without the influence and company of those two extreme characters!

      Pike angling is full of harmless eccentrics, most of whom I seem to have either fished with, drank with or swapped yarns with. I owe you all a debt of gratitude. Some of them, like John Sidley, Ray Webb and Barrie Rickards, are no longer with us and are sorely missed. Others, like John Watson, Mick Brown and Gord Burton are as irrepressible as ever. To them and everyone else I’ve fished with over the years, a special thank-you.

      David Phillips, 2012

      Chapter 1

      Meet the Pike

      The pike is without doubt Britain’s most talked-about fish. It’s big, powerful and, to the uninformed, an ugly, greedy predator. Virtually every angler has a tale to tell about the pike’s supposedly prodigious appetite, and even non-angling members of the public often have a piece of outrageous pike lore to relate.

      As a result, somewhere back in angling history, the pike earned the tag ‘freshwater shark’. Of course, it is in no way related to the shark family, but its somewhat fearsome appearance was undoubtedly responsible for that misnomer. Nature gave the pike a long, streamlined body, a pointed snout and an awesome set of very sharp teeth. The unusual (for a coarse fish) position of its eyes gives it the advantage of binocular vision and caused countless angling writers through the ages to remark upon its so-called ‘baleful glare". It’s certainly the only fish in freshwater that will look you in the eye, which is a bit disconcerting...

      Fear of the unknown has always caused Man’s imagination to run riot. In the case of the pike, this has spawned a rich vein of legend. Fred Buller documented many of these facts and fables in his 1978 classic Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike… and very entertaining they are too. But the object of this book is not to perpetrate myth, but to enable the reader to catch more and better pike through understanding the facts about his chosen species.

      Contrary to folklore, pike do not attack the limbs of unsuspecting bathers. Nor do they attempt to make a meal from the snouts of cattle drinking at the waterside. In fact even the oft-described ambushes of waterfowl are comparatively rare. Only once have I witnessed a pike take a bird, in this case a moorhen, from the surface of the water. I was bream fishing at the time, on Norfolk’s Great Ouse Relief Channel, and the same day another very big pike followed a 3 lb bream that I had hooked, all the way to landing net.

      That particular pike would have been about three feet long and probably weighed 16 lb or more. According to the tales of the distant past, pike of six feet or more in length were sometimes caught, particularly in the great loughs of the west of Ireland, where monster pike weighing over 90 lb were reported. Unfortunately, there is no way of going back in time to check out the veracity of these colourful claims. It seems unlikely that pike in the 19th century would grow so much bigger than pike in the 21st century, although Domesday author Fred Buller believed that the sheer abundance of high-protein food in the form of abundant migratory fish like salmon back in 1800s and early 1900s could have been responsible for the apparent super-strain of pike to be found in Ireland in those days.

      These days, sadly, pike do not attain a length of six feet or more. I only wish they did!

      So let’s forget the folklore and get down to the facts. The pike, Latin name Esox lucius, is the most successful freshwater predatory fish in the northern hemisphere. Those same physical features which, over the ages, filled Man with such dread, have also contributed to its position at the head of the food chain on countless lakes and rivers across Europe and North America. Its adaptability to a wide range of environments have made it very widespread and, therefore, an ideal target for the angler.

      On most waters in the British Isles you can expect to catch pike averaging 3-7 lb and even a very mediocre pike fishery will generally turn up occasional double-figure specimens of 10 lb or more. By the time a female pike has reached this weight it is likely to measure at least 32 inches long. Male pike, for some reason, seldom exceed 7-8 lb in weight.

      The ultimate size of the pike to be expected at your chosen venue depends upon the fertility of the water and angling pressure. A good, clean, environment with healthy stocks of other species of coarse fish of all sizes will, all things being equal, produce excellent pike. In most areas, and on the majority of waters, a pike of 10 lb or more is considered a good fish. I’ll certainly never tire of catching pike of that calibre, even though most venues are also capable of producing pike weighing 15 lb or more.

      Pike of 20 lb-plus are, however, quite rare on all but the richest waters and can be considered real specimens in any angler’s book. Only an exceptional individual is likely to grow to the 20 lb mark. At this stage the pike is usually at least six years old, more likely eight, and

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